Midyear check: Holding midfielders
As the calendar flips to 2026, here are the defensive midfielders standing out by the numbers
The ADAM formula is dead, long live the ADAM formula.
If you missed it, some news shook the football stats community last night, which was that FBRef and Opta had broken up, effectively rendering the former site dead in the water from an advanced stats perspective.
Among the decision’s far-reaching impacts — the freshly retooled ADAM formula will have to move forward with a new set of foundation data, which is especially crappy news for someone who just spent an entire summer trying to perfect the damn thing.
That said, I do still recognize that my own plight is relatively small potatoes compared to the impacts to football fans more broadly. The football media and fan discussion spaces have been flooded lately with tons of disinformation, and while FBRef’s green bars could be used to fuel that in the hands of the wrong user, they also served as exactly what the site’s name would imply: FBRef was a reference point, a place to learn that certainly inspired more people than just me to take a deeper interest in the way the game is measured and analyzed. Discussion about the sport is worse off for this decision, and if some of the rumors are true, it’s for the absolute worst reason. But it’s not my place to talk about that here.
Thankfully, one final pull of the numbers did take place before the site was wiped, and we get to use that today to provide update one on deeper-lying midfielders throughout Europe. So rather than turning this further into a eulogy, let’s dig in.
